Amid the ubiquity of today's techno-futurist AI marketing campaigns, the importance of human writing and reading is being questioned by some scholars. For example, in a recent New York Times op-ed, Chair of the Williams College Philosophy Department Joe Cruz argued (to quote the headline), "Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think." (I've chosen not to link to Cruz's article, because it's clickbait. Nevertheless, it represents an increasingly vocal camp of anti-humanist thinkers in higher education.)
Thankfully, the University of Washington continues to be graced by the presence of brilliant students like senior English Major Piper Sorensen, who just this past summer wrote a stunning Perspectives article published by the College of Arts and Sciences arguing for the value of majoring in English (and learning to write and read in general). In the excerpt below, Sorensen lays out the stakes of her argument and why it's absurd that so many people today are denying the value of English studies:
Our world would be bleak without the arts, without literature, without our passion for each other and for humanity. Why else would some of the first humans have smeared stick figures on cave walls, if not in part to connect and, in connecting, to understand? Humans have always held a certain angst: we have always sought to understand what we cannot fathom. Death and what comes after, our purpose, the existence or nonexistence of something behind the curtain, beyond our grasp; arts and the humanities have always been an expression of this, with reading and writing being no exception.
As Sorensen eloquently reminds us, when we abandon the pursuit of reading and writing, we are abandoning not merely the humanities, but humanity in general. You can read the entire article from CAS Perspectives here:
Humanity Was Here